What Women Say When They Talk About Sex

By: Jardine Libaire

The ritual begins in high school, in bedrooms, one girl hugging a
teddy bear to her chest as she talks, the other drawing graffiti on her
blue jeans while she listens. As adults, women continue the tradition—while drinking champagne at marble-topped bars, sweating in saunas
together, or walking down snowy city streets.

We talk about sex. We talk about you.

The transcripts are funny, when they're not sad. As complicated as
quantum physics, or as simple as strawberry pie. These talks, if you
overheard them, would be strange, or disheartening, or stunning, or
filthy, or most likely all those things on the same page.

Sex is
a dark place, and everyone's swinging a lantern, finding their
individual ways. When we compare notes with our girlfriends about
adventures in the wilderness, we're also leaving footprints of why we
feel, what we think, and how we dream. If you follow our tracks, we'll
take you back to where we live.

(Want the best sex of your life? Check out the Men's Health Big Book of Sex to last longer, give her a mind-blowing orgasm, and learn 44 amazing sex positions.)

Polite, But Not Really

We can do locker-room rundowns as aggressively as any athlete, but
women first use a delicate code in our inquiries with each other. Did you have fun last night? Was he sweet?
These are graphic questions, but they're folded into a blank envelope
so the inquiree has the option of sharing or not sharing X-rated
details. (Although every woman has that friend who always tells us
everything we never wanted to know, so the next time we see her
boyfriend, we can't look him in the eye.)

In the uncommon but always interesting case of two women having
"overlapped," (gone home with the same guy on different nights), that
delicacy applies: What did you think? This is asked as if two women had just read the same bestseller (It was a page turner, only took me a couple of hours to finish) or ordered the same grilled-lamb special (It was lean and spicy; I would get it again).

Don't believe the hype: As much as people love to say that for women, sex is about love, what women often love about sex is sex.

What's Good, Anyway?

Good question. In fourth grade, a bunch of us thought we were little
Kierkegaards, arguing on the bus what we believed was the most
existential question ever asked: How do I know that what I call blue is
the same color as what you call blue?

If whether a guy is "good" is the hinge to every conversation about sex, it's a crooked, fallible one. I might tell my friend I had good sex, and she'll be glad for me, but we'll unknowingly be picturing two completely different scenarios.

A missionary episode that I might consider boring, preppy, vanilla sex,
my friend might think is brutally sincere, slow and hard, elegantly
simple lovemaking. What this proves is that the best sex is sex
tailored to the person in bed with you. Love the one you're with, not
the idea of someone or some act, not according to a generic
prescription for sex, not in pursuit of some abstract goal, and then any sex can become good.

Put confidence in your ability to learn about each
other; enjoy the process of slowing down, even backing up, turning
around, and trying again.

Skillz

Sometimes a woman casually refers to things like "twisting the
tiger's tail" or "resonant orgasms" as if her girlfriends know exactly
what she means. (Many of us won't betray ignorance but will say things
like Oh, yeah, twisting the tail, love it, then Google the
technique later.) In this way, our talk functions like a Tupperware
party: A leader spells out tips for her crew, and the pointers trickle
into the homes of many. It's a pyramid system of carnal knowledge.

If, however, we try on you something that's obviously newly
acquired, and we grimace as if we were assembling an Ikea armoire from
18 pages of diagrams, you should feel free to gently show us how to do
it better. Or in some situations just get us off the hook and into the
next activity.

In terms of your skills, it's true, there's the occasional
superhero who lifts cars with a finger and flies over tall buildings
(or however that translates sexually). That man who lets a lady go
first, or who can go again and again, and then again, or who is
diabolically dexterous, is welcome at my dinner table.

But a skill or a tool without a heart behind it is worth nothing. In
all honesty, we talk more about a guy's general, soulful presence in
the office than we do about how fast and accurately he creates a
spreadsheet.

If you've got a new skill, by all means, break it out.
But do so with respect for the mood, and for her reaction; if it's not
working, let it go.

Silence

However, if his skills are too good, we don't talk about it at all.
No one needs other women peering in the bedroom window, steaming the
glass like kids lusting after a train set in an icy storefront at
Christmas.

If you somehow hear that your girlfriend is the quiet one in her crew, don't feel left out. Feel euphorically proud.

The Naughty Story

Often a woman will tell a friend a kinky story piece by piece,
gauging her listener, pulling back if she senses disapproval, and
elaborating if she perceives approval. She'll be bragging as much as
trying to figure out if what she did the night before is legal. This
reminds me of being 10 and eating an ant on the playground for a
dollar; it took many tellings of the story, testing my public, to
determine if I was cool or I was a loser.

That's because inside each one of us argyle-sock schoolteachers,
there's an Amsterdam hooker wearing a gold thong and suspenders. Inside
her is a wool-suited librarian reshelving books of 18th-century poetry.
And inside her is an 18-year-old Iowa cheerleader on some sinful
mission in her Trans Am. And at the heart is Eve, barefoot in an
orchard.

Like a set of Russian dolls.

It's not just that society likes to get two antithetical things from
us; we ourselves want to be two antithetical things. This results in a
kind of organic and fun schizophrenia. And if you can just go with it,
everyone might be very happy.

We hash out the naughty stuff with our girlfriends because even a
hedonist occasionally feels an amphitheater of superego judges watching
her. And then we have a crisis of confidence about whatever lascivious
thing we've done: I know I did the beautiful, raw, rude, ecstatic thing, but did I do the right thing?

If we go out on a sexual limb, it's amazing when you
assure us it was worth it. Tell us you loved it. In 5 minutes, tell us
again.

Debacles and Damage Control

You drunkenly wet the bed. You pull out your house keys and Viagra
spills like candy. She finds a scarlet negligee on the bathroom
doorknob, an earring glittering in the sheets.

She's going to talk about it with someone. She can talk about it
with her friends, or with her mother, or on her widely read blog. So it
never hurts for you to be the one to bring it up, make light of it if
necessary, or gain back her trust if possible, because then you might
be the only one she talks to about whatever happened.

Relationships that convert disasters into bonding memories last longer.

The Oprah Factor

Sometimes, though, a woman will have a conference with friends on
handling a crisis, and her friends will not be shy. We all like to feel
like Oprah.

After such sessions, without necessarily knowing they've occurred,
you might have that feeling that someone's been in your house, even if
nothing's missing or moved.

And sometimes to no good end. Love is the most inexact science, and
we ladies feel we counsel with the best intentions, but our own lives
get in the way. I recently listened as a gang of women advised a friend
to leave a guy. But behind those friends' earnest faces was unhappiness
in their own relationships, or jealousy, or pain. Secretly they
transferred their own grudges.

Whenever I'm about to put friends' advice before my instincts, I hear my father's voice: And what if they told you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge?
If the woman you love looks like she's spinning from too many
directives, don't attempt to prove your reasoning on top of it all.
Make her feel safe; be receptive. When she feels good, she can open up.
At first you may feel like you're doing battle with a tribe of her
invisible allies, but wait.

A good talk between a man and a woman always simmers down to the two real people in the room—the two people who matter.

Morality

Men might be confounded by the Victorian lace of logic women cite in the average sexual anecdote: If
he likes doing that to me, then I LOVE it, and if he loves it, then
it's all I want; but if he doesn't really like it, I can't enjoy it
knowing that he's not enjoying it, you know? Or I didn'thave to, but he didn't expect me to, so I figured I would. It's a daisy chain of tiny ethical decisions.

If we get a faraway, concerned look in our eyes at some pivotal
moment in bed, we might be thumbing through a virtual, heirloom manual
of dirty etiquette in our head, looking for the chapter on whatever
we're about to do, or what we just did, or what we want to do.

Give us a moment; we'll figure it out if we don't feel pressured.

Storytelling 101

What might take a man a minute and a half to tell his friend becomes
for a woman an hour-long story. She'll tell her own friend everything
from what gin was in her martini to whether the guy pulled out her
chair to how she ordered her steak cooked, and eventually get to how
many times she came, and how hard. This reflects the truth of women's
sexual reality: Everything matters.

If you honor the bits and pieces along the way, you make an extraordinary investment in the possibilities.

Speechless

I have friends who over the years have never discussed the sex they
have with their husband or boyfriend. They keep it locked up, like a
diamond on blue velvet in a safe-deposit box. And it gains power for
being so dearly and privately held. After all my talk here about talk,
there's a lot to be said for discretion.

Besides, when it comes to describing the real thing, when a woman
has stumbled on the right man the right way, she'll be short of
explanation. She'll blush, look at her friend, look away. I don't know, it's just . . . I don't know. This dumbfounding is more of an achievement than any thesis-length treatise we've ever given.

Being in love, even if just for a night, bewilders everyone, sends
us back to the beginning. Makes us wordless as the day we were born.